Programming for the fun of it

About Reuben

A brief history of the Development of Reuben as a Developer

So sometime during my tenure at Maine-Memorial Elementary School I remember using LOGO to program a greeting for my parents on Back To School night. I was very proud of it, but something went a bit wrong for some reason the then end product was something like the attached image. I must have turned right instead of left at the last turn.

Got the first family PC

I remember distinctly going to Radio Shack on a cold day to pick out our first computer. It was a Tandy with a dot matrix printer and 3.5 inch disk drive, and if I remember correctly it had 256K RAM. It was very exciting for me though and instantly a new world was opened to me.

Created My First Application - Tripeak

Upon visiting my friend who had windows 3 installed, there was an interesting new solitaire game called Tri-Peaks. Instantly addicted I wanted to play it on my old Tandy, but alas, the Tandy was still running just DOS. Somewhere along the way I had discovered BASIC so I took it upon myself to program Tri-Peaks solitaire in BASIC. This was the first really big program I attempted and I wish I still had the code somewhere just for laughs. I think somewhere in the process I discovered GOSUB and for the first time broke out of the LINE by LINE programming which ended up being quite useful. The graphics were incredibly basic but it worked, and I could play tripeak to my heart's content.

Took My First Programming Class

So somewhere in High School I remember having a computer class where we were taught basic programming in TurboPascal. Having perfected (in my mind) my programming skills during the Tri-Peak project I sailed through the exercises rather quickly and had a bunch of extra time during class. One day, after finishing my assignment and getting bored of playing Green Globs (see picture below), I decided to write a program that would automatically generate the name song, "Mary Bary Bo Bary, Banana Fana Fo Farry, Me My Mo Mary. Mary!" I remember it being a little tricky to strip off all the consonants until I got a vowel. My friend Chuck was sitting next to me watching my progress and he conveniently had 2 consonants at the beginning of his name. Unfortunately I used his name as a test case right when the teacher was walking by which got me in a bit of hot water - Chuck Chuck Bo Buck .... well you get the idea.

Stop! Quaker Time!

So in September 1993 I packed my bags and headed off to the City of Brotherly Love to attend the University of Pennsylvania. In those days I aspired to be a high school math teacher and so consequently spent most of my time studying Math and various other liberal artsy stuff. I did manage to slip in one Intro to Programming class (CSE 110). That course language was Java so I got my first exposure to Object Oriented programming, which at the time seemed did not seem as exciting as I have now come to appreciate. I loved my time at Penn and did very well (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa and all that). However, since I was only a math teacher for one summer (any more would have killed me!) if I had to do it all over again I would definitely have availed myself of Penn's Computer and Information Science Department a bit more.

Stop! Quaker Time!

So in September 1993 I packed my bags and headed off to the City of Brotherly Love to attend the University of Pennsylvania. In those days I aspired to be a high school math teacher and so consequently spent most of my time studying Math and various other liberal artsy stuff. I did manage to slip in one Intro to Programming class (CSE 110). That course language was Java so I got my first exposure to Object Oriented programming, which at the time seemed did not seem as exciting as I have now come to appreciate. I loved my time at Penn and did very well (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa and all that). However, since I was only a math teacher for one summer (any more would have killed me!) if I had to do it all over again I would definitely have availed myself of Penn’s Computer and Information Science Department a bit more.